Aide: Obama made key NSA decision Thursday night

1/17/14 6:27 PM EST

President Barack Obama did not decide until Thursday night that in his surveillance speech Friday he would call for the National Security Agency to give up its trove of data on U.S. phone calls, a top aide said.

"Always the final decision and the toughest decisions are left to the end....The final decision on what to do about Section 215, that the government will not hold this data, that was made last night by the president," Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes said Friday in an interview with Bloomberg's Julianna Goldman.

"He was still working on his speech even after that decision had been made. I spoke to him as late as midnight last night with final changes that he was putting on, refinements that he was putting on the speech. So, ultimately, we tee up all these decisions. We make them on a rolling basis. But he's going to make the final calls, and he made them last night," Rhodes added in the interview, set to air Friday night on Bloomberg's "Political Capital with Al Hunt."

The late decision by the president could help explain the widely varying predictions contained in a series of news accounts that emerged in the days before the speech. Two prominent stories, one in the New York Times and another in the Washington Post, suggested that Obama was poised to reject an outside review group's recommendation that the government end its storage of telephone metadata. In the end, he essentially embraced it, but asked members of his adminisration to settle on a new scheme to replace it.